Phi Kappa Psi - University of Iowa

} 10A - The Daily Iowan - Iowa City, Iowa - Friday. )anua/)' 21, 1994 Viewpoints Quotable HOnce you defrost, it 's just like opening a grave in spring ... Jim Wonick senior maintenance worker at Oakland Cemetery on the perils of his occupation during the winter Forgiveness not • appropnate Recently the DI printed a lengthy Associated Press article on the murder of Cedar Rapids mail carrier Gloria Heising from the viewpoint of a close friend of her murderer. The arti- cle stated that Ronald DOWDS Sr. was a good person and had expressed remorse at the killing. The friend interviewed, Mar- garet Bails, complained that the media had only reported the ~tory from Heising's perspective, failing to realize the extent of DoWDS' emotional trauma in his relationship with Heising and the stress he had faced since losing his job. Call me unsympathetic, but I don't care to hear his side of the sto- ry. I don't want to hear a laundry list of nice things he's done for her, or how sorry he is for killing her. What I want is for this woman to have her life back. : Often it is editorial policy in highly publicized crimes such as this one to interview those who knew the accused . Friends and neighbors iive quotes showing shock and disbelief that the nice man down the street has just been convicted of a savage felony. Yet when the perpe- trator has at one point been involved with his victim, the same friends and neighbors are apt to consider the crime as merely an Unfortunate climax in a domestic squabble. I find it abhorrent that a t(lan killing a woman, regardless of his past or present relationship to qer, should be treated as though his actions may have been, on some level, justified. This is what Bails implies when she says, "Nobody has lUs side, what it was from his side. All J know is he went through a lot ~r her ." :Call me unsympathetic, but I don't care to hear his side :of the story. I don't want to hear a laundry list of nice 'things he's done for her, or how sorry he is for killing 'her. What I want is for this woman to have her life back. • , In July, Iowa adopted anti-stalking legislation; 38 states now have such laws. Yet, as this case proves, a woman's ability to protect her- self through legal means is limited. In 1991, Downs pleaded guilty for threatening to kill Helsing, but was given a one-year suspended sen- \i'nce and placed on probation rather than incarcerated. At the time of tbe murder Helsing had a restraining order against Downs, yet this pieoe of paper ultimately failed to shield her from him. Women qe in a bind: If they take legal action against a man they risk mak- ing him angry enough to take truly desperate measures, but if tbey dO nothing they are left completely vulnerable. Many women have gilne into hiding to prevent themselves and their childre.n from being stalked and harassed • I have no alternatives, sbort of constant police protection, to offer women in such a situation. But I do believe that the societal reaction t~ domestic violence i8 very important. In describing Heising's ambivalence toward Downs and his subsequent sacrifices for her, IJails .shows classic signs of blaming the victim. Mutual acquain- tances of estranged couples often fail to unequivocally support a Woman if the relationship turns violent; they insist on fairness to both sides, even if it means equating her inconsistencies with his physical abuse. If we are to truly protect women, we must make a clear differentiation between a lovers' spat and domestic violence. \fhen a woman is stalked and harassed by a former partner there are no longer two sides to the story. We must also realize that many men - and women - lose their jobs, families, housing and general sense of identity as an indirect result of a difficult breakup, yet this is never justification for battering. Downs says he regrets Heising's murder. I imagine his remorse is genuine; I too would be sorry had I just shot another human being five times at close range while she desperately begged for her life. However. Bails' defense of Downs based on this apology is a weak one. Unconditional forgiveness should not be offered to any batterer who is sorry for his actions after the fact. Our society must be more ' critical of men who are violent to women, for it is impossible to pro- tect the victims while simultaneously sympathizing with the abusers. laura Fokkena submitted this guest opinion for publication. • lETTERS POlleY. Letters to the editor must be signed and must include the writer's address and phone number for verification. letters should not exceed 400 words. The Daily Iowan reserves the right to edit for length and clarity. The Daily Iowan will publish only one letter per author per month . 'OPINIONS expressed on the Viewpoints Pages of The Daily Iowan are those of the signed authors. The Daily Iowan, as a nonprofit corporation, does not express opinions on these matters. -GUEST OPINIONS are articles on current issues written by readers of The Daily Iowan . The 01 welcomes guest opinions; submissions should be typed and signed, and should not exceed 750 words in length. A brief biography should accompany all .submissions. The Daily Iowan reserves the right to edit for length, style and darity. Politics in the absence of compassi There's an old game in town, and it's one that's traveled under a variety of names; but for the span of this arti- cle, anyway, I'll tag it with a moniker of my own making: "politics opposed to compassion." In the Jan. 1 edition of the Iowa City Press·Citi- zen, Managing Editor Dan Hogan blasted unwed mothers, a group of people who conserv- ative Americans just can't seem to leave alone . And in an amazing display of the "to-the-right lock step," Hogan defended former Vice Presi- dent Dan Quayle's attack on the fictional sit- com character Murphy Brown. Hogan's argument was spurred by an Associ- ated Press article which cited a disparity between the number of children reported to census takers and the number of birth certifi- cates issued during the same period . The AP article speculated that the disparity may have been caused by single parents' embarrassment at simply being single parents . The article summed it all up in two sentences: "They ought to be embarrassed (to be labeled unwed mothers). They ought to feel the pres- sure to value the firm family structure. " This rather simplistic take on a complicated issue, that of people being collectively lumped into the category of "unwed mothers," ignores the individual situations of those so-labeled ; what of widows? For the more conservative members of our readership, what of women who lost their husbands to armed U.S. incur- sions into Iraq, Panama, World War II? Are they to be dismissed with a wave of the hand and the pompously self-righteous pontification that by simply being unwed parents, they "ought to be embarrassed"? And (for the benefit of the pro-life crowd) what of women who are victims of sexual assault, but choose not only not to adopt a resultant child out, but also refuse to undergo an abortion? The anti-abortion crowd runs thick with conservatives; could there- be a con- flict in the notion of blaming a woman for being THI . ''- MODERN WORLD • "unwed" to her attacker(s) while still electing to bring to term the fetus and raise the child which might result from such an attack? On Saturday, Jan. 15, speakers involved with ·Comedy Relief 6: a telethon to benefit the homeless, released the following statistic: Nearly 50 percent of all homeless women are single mothers fleeing domestic violence. Are they to be publicly slandered for simply wishing to protect themselves and their chil- dren? Because they are single parents - unwed mothers - Hogan would have us believe "they ought to be embarrassed.' To shout down from one's post at a local daily solely to demonstrate one's disdain for an over- generalized classification of people demon- strates obtuse, even arrogant disregard, for the individuals classified. It is to demonstrate dis- like for an entire group of people for no readily apparent reason .. . apart, that is, from "Dan Quayle did it too." Hogan harks back to the time and place of · Ozzie and Harriet" as his paragon of the Good Old Days. But "Ozzie and Harriet" was not true to its time: it never happened. It was a televi- sion show, where married adults slept in sepa- rate beds, wearing heavy-duty pajamas con- structed of a heavy-duty fabric, 80 as not to catch an embarrassing glance of one another. Magically, they also had children. He could just as accurately have hearkened back to "The Partridge Family; another TV dreamland where family values were respected and reality could never be spotted anywhere near the current story line. But Mrs . Partridge, matriarch of the musi- cally inclined brood, also had Murphy Brown's "embarrassing" affiiction: The obviously wholly malevolent Partridge was (Gasp!) an unwed mother. Obviously, the trollop was a part of the larger campaign to destroy family values: She didn't even have the decency to have a husband - after hers died, that is. Another disturbing comment came in Hogan's dismissal of the concept of women gov- erning their own lives and making their own decisions: "Women's bodies are their own affair, and if they want to breed without benefit of husband, it is their right. ritE NE~S MEDIA HAVE !lAO A FIELD /JAY LAT£L'I'.~ fROM 'f1'fILlATIN6 IlUMOR5 ABOUT BILL (LINTON'S f)!\ VIIJ A'H ITAL ACTIVITIES-- ,.,RIJIMR~ wHlell !lAVE ~E(,EIIJED MOAE (o'J- EAAu£ 11lAN T~E FACr$ CO~(efb.IN(, filE. PREVIOUS ADMINISTAATION'S (OMPLIt11'( IN ARMING IRAQ ... "That premise is wrong-headed.· In two sentences, Hogan throws woman's right to decide how to live her life. choose when and how and even if she shOUli have children. Why do some decide that they have the 1'IIIoi,1 ..... ,' .. • to make private. personal decisions for WOllleol,en And why, I wonder, are so many who ready to judge those in difficult ~;;~=\:!:i Caucasian, middle-aged, "'''U'l1UI.II.n.,. males - those who will never being in the difficult positions of judge? (In all fairness, I'm not trying to imaliJ1a\!e that all well-to-do, middle-aged WASPs BIII:~IIICilI(ll Hogan's views.) In June of 1992, Dave Barry dealt Quayle's observations on unwed mothers the following passage: "So we see that the root cause of the de6tiincon1~ is, like so many other things: sex. Thie true in the case of urban unrest, as was IIOUItWotrath out by vice-president-in-training Dan \tWIVlollimlller who observed that the L.A. riots were C&wltifjth by Murphy Brown's having a baby. took a lot of heat from the bleeding-heart al, Democratic, Communist, lesbian. pro-death, anti-family, book reading, intellectual elite media this, but the evidence backs him up. ,",UJUlIQ!kist the events: "April 30 - L.A. had riots. "May 18 - Murphy Brown had a baby." The philosophy of politics opposed to L1JIQ.Plll.nns. sion makes possible the pro-life moveDnenl1~ endorsement of the cold-blooded abortion providers (as broadcast on earlier this month), as well as the "God hates fags' signs which very ,",UIClO'.ig protesters bear at AIDS victims' funerals. practice of politics opposed to compassion only ever lead to arrogant, callous disreglll(J(hlel from those in positions of authority and ' lege for those who lack the luxury of a soapbox for the airing of their views - a box such as the managing editor's weekly umn in his own newspaper. Jonathan Lyons' column appears Fridays on the Viewpoints Pages. Political correctness impeding AIDS preventi A major initiative to find a cure for AIDS was announced recently by Don- na Shalala. Clinton's' secre- tary of health and human services. This latest drive for a solution to the AIDS epidemic involves an impressive mobilization of researchers from the private sector, gay activists and gov- ernment officials teamed up to accelerate the search for a.n effective treatment. However, most physi- cians and scientists directly involved with find- ing a cure for AIDS, such as Dr. Jack Stapleton, director of virology at the UJ Medical Clinic, will without hesitation admit that a cure for the virus is "a long way away." So for now our best bet for fighting the dis- ease remains prevention. Yet, as the Shalala announcement's exclusive focus on cure high- lights, it iii unacceptable to publicly discuss spe- cific measures - targeted at specific groups - that should be taken in order to slow the trans- mission of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The climate in which the issue of AIDS preven- tion is being discussed has become so imbued with concern for the PQlitically correct that health officials are wary of directing their pre- vention campaigns at or placing demands on any identifiable section of the population, lest they offend one group or another . The result of this reticence is that preven- tion campaigns administered by the govern- ment (such as the one unveiled two weeks ago in which animated condoms send a message of safer sex aimed largely at heterosexual young adults) often fail to focus on the groups at high- est risk of infection: gay men, intravenous drug users and, to an increasing degree, minorities. Thus, scarce AIDS prevention resources are aimed scatter8hot at a disease that exists pri- marily in several distinct segments of society. The epidemic, according to a recent report by the National Research Council, is "settling into spatially and socially isolated groups and possi- bly becoming en.demic in them." Prevention pro- grams such as California'S, where 80 percent of people living with AIDS are gay and only 10 percent of prevention dollars are spent on homosexuals, are simply too diffuse to properly attack the problem. Other programs fail to recognize or, for polit- ical reasons, choose not to recognize the fact that certain racial groups are at a far greater risk of acquiring HJV than others. For instance, blacks and Hispanics currently constitute fully half of all Americans living with HIV, but account for only 24 percent of the population . The National Commission on AIDS last week also reported that cases within these groups grew 11.5 percent and 10.5 percent, respective- ly, in 1991, while they fell 0.5 percent among whites. According to University of California at San Francisco Professor John Peterson, "there need to be many more intervention programs designed specifically for the Mrican-American and Latino populations.· Government AIDS prevention programs have also not sufficiently targeted those men and women in danger of acquiring HIV through intravenous drug use, a subset of the popula- tion that is most responsible for the spread of the virus among heterosexuals, and a group whose HJV spreading behavior is, according to Stapleton, most easily amended. What's missing from most state and federal programs is the recognition that the AIDS epi- demic is actually a number of micro-epidemics. Prevention and treatment measures require an approach tailored to the specific needs of those aftlicted. What's al80 needed, and for political reasons conspicuously absent from most AIDS preven- tion progrlllJl8. is the message that HIV suffer- ers - and those groups likely to be afflicted with HIV - have a responsibility to help curb the continued spread of the disease. Althouah certain amount of backlash Is inevitable, and federal prevention programs must lay moral claim on those most likely to acquire (gays, intravenous drug users and anyone received a blood transfusion before 1985) implore them as a social obligation to come ... -.-1 ward and be confidentially tested. If the test , positive, they should inform anyone with they have had sexual contact and warn potential new mates. "Many gays fear that testing and tracing may lead to their losing the apartment or privacy." contends ~t.lDljl_ These are grave and valid concerns. there are ways to protect an HIV sufferer's rights without obstructing necessary health measures. These civil liberties upheld by a corresponding campaign heightens public awareness about the AIDS is not transmitted, by increasing tion of dats banks and through the p88llS' more stringent legislation pursuant to abUil HIV victims. Singling out certain groups to the burden in the fight against AID ay late several tenets of political correctneu. ever, the insidious nature of the diseass failure 'of benign prevention efforts that we direct our attack on the spread of at those who are most likely to be carrying virus and with methods that have the chance of success . The fact is that if AIDS were any other ease, we would have little trouble im]plelmell.'i the necessary preventive measures. It's put politics aside and stop wasting time ill fight against AIDS. Dave Ash /s column appears Fridays on the View- ... -- points Pages.

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